All poems in English including sonnets, lyrical poems, narrative poems, and metrical experiments in various forms.
Poems
This volume consists of all poems in English including sonnets, lyrical poems, narrative poems, and metrical experiments in various forms. All such poems published by Sri Aurobindo during his lifetime are included here, as well as poems found among his manuscripts after his passing. Sri Aurobindo worked on these poems over the course of seven decades. The first one was published in 1883 when he was ten; a number of poems were written or revised more than sixty years later, in the late 1940s.
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Not soon is God's delight in us completed, Nor with one life we end; Termlessly in us are our spirits seated, A termless joy intend.
Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature And have a dateless birth; The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature, They were not made on earth,
Nor to the earth do they bequeath their ashes, But in themselves they last. An endless future brims beneath thy lashes, Child of an endless past.
Page 213
Old memories come to us, old dreams invade us, Lost people we have known, Fictions and pictures; but their frames evade us,— They stand out bare, alone.
Yet all we dream and hope are memories treasured, Are forecasts we misspell, But of what life or scene he who has measured The boundless heavens can tell.
Time is a strong convention; future and present Were living in the past; They are one image that our wills complaisant Into three schemes have cast.
Our past that we forget, is with us deathless, Our births and later end Already accomplished. To a summit breathless Sometimes our souls ascend,
Whence the mind comes back helped; for there emerges The ocean vast of Time Spread out before us with its infinite surges, Its symphonies sublime;
And even from this veil of mind the spirit Looks out sometimes and sees The bygone aeons that our lives inherit, The unborn centuries:
It sees wave-trampled realms expel the Ocean,— From the vague depths uphurled Where now Himâloy stands, the flood's huge motion Sees measuring half the world;
Page 214
Or else the web behind us is unravelled And on its threads we gaze,— Past motions of the stars, scenes long since travelled In Time's far-backward days.
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